This is the Xastir APRS client repository.
This is primarily a maintenance release to assure that build problems on some distros are addressed in released code, but there are a few bug fixes in it as well.
Notable changes since release 2.1.8:
Github issue #203: Xastir can now use either the legacy version of PCRE (sometimes referred to in package management systems as "PCRE3") or the current, supported version, PCRE2. The legacy version has been deprecated since 2015 and is no longer under development, and some Linux distributions are starting to remove legacy PCRE and any package that depends on it from their package management systems. This change assures that Xastir can remain in those systems.
If PCRE2 is installed and shapelib support is enabled, then PCRE2 is used even if legacy PCRE is installed. If legacy PCRE is installed, PCRE2 is not found, and shapelib support is enabled, then legacy PCRE will be used.
Github issue #199: A bug was fixed that caused the station lists dialogs to suffer an off-by-one error when a user clicked on a station in the list, centering the map not on the station clicked, but the one following it.
Github issue #25: Code that worked around API changes in extremely old versions of ImageMagick has been removed. The minimum version of ImageMagick now supported by Xastir is 6.6.9, which is itself quite old.
Users are reminded that Xastir cannot support ImageMagick 7 at this time and only ImageMagick 6 (the legacy version) can be used. Users continue to be advised to use GraphicsMagick instead.
Github issue #156: The default display level for shapefile maps with no associated dbfawk or with a dbfawk that fails to initialize display level has been changed so the default behavior of such maps is to display them at all zoom levels. Previously, the default value was too small for them to be seen at full world zoom levels.
Github issue #202 and others: Numerous deprecated macros have been removed from configure.ac, which stops "bootstrap.sh" from reporting annoying deprecation warnings with inappropriate messages about how to fix them.
This change does have the potential of breaking Xastir builds on extremely old operating systems with compilers that do not fully implement the C89 and C99 standards. Further, a minor issue with configure.ac that prevented it from working properly with GCC 13 was fixed (pull request #204).
Pull request #185: A failure to initialize a value caused builds of Xastir on Cygwin to fail to connect to internet servers.
Github issue #121: One further fix was made to allow Xastir to accept GPS sentences without regard to what "talker" produced them. Partial fixes to this issue were present in version 2.1.8, but until this version there were still some GPS devices whose sentences would be ignored solely because we were making assumptions about the "talker" identification letters.
Pull request #186: A misuse of a "bash" specific shell syntax would cause Xastir's configure script when run under any other shell to fail to recognize a working "gv" installation, and therefore conclude it could not print maps. This was primarily a problem on operating systems for which the default root shell was not bash, and on which Xastir was being built by root (this was clearly happening when Xastir was being installed from FreeBSD's ports system, since root's default shell is usually /bin/csh or /bin/sh (the real Bourne shell, not bash)).
Versions of Xastir built from a git clone of the Xastir repository will now show in the Help->About dialog a detailed description of the source code state that was used when it was built. This output is taken from "git describe" and shows not only the git commit from which the code was built, but how many commits there have been since the last release and whether the repository was clean or not.
This feature is only enabled when the Xastir source tree was an actual git clone, not if it just happens to have been a tarball unpacked into some other git repository (as happens often in the git repositories of package management systems). Binaries built from tarballs (even if those tarballs are unpacked in some other git repo) will report only their version number in the Help->About dialog.
This is primarily a maintenance release to assure that build problems on some distros are addressed in released code, but there are a few bug fixes in it as well.
The Xastir project no longer provides tar files that have been "bootstrapped" --- all users of Xastir source must now run "bootstrap.sh" to create the configure script irrespective of how they've obtained the code (through a release tarball, github master branch tarball or git clone).
If Xastir crashes, instances of the network server no longer stick around to interfere with starting up a new copy of Xastir. (issue #130)
The get-NWSdata script now correctly respects the install prefix in all its steps (pull request #172)
Xastir's probe for libproj no longer looks for the deprecated function pj_init, making it compatible with newer versions of the proj library. (issue #173)
Some unused, buggy diagnostic code has been removed. This code was causing segfaults on some systems. (issue #174)
Some debugging code that was unintentionally left in place caused Xastir to output some diagnostic information to standard error, leading users to think there was a problem. The information was unimportant to anyone but a developer working on that bit of the code, and was not indicative of a problem at all. It has been removed.
Some very ancient autoconf code was updated to work with more recent versions of autoconf. This removes several deprecation warnings, but more importantly removes fatal errors in the most recent version of automake (pull request #181)
The "install-xastir" script has been removed. Users are encouraged to read the INSTALL document follow all directions. There is no shortcut, and the presence of this script implied that there was.
Xastir Release 2.1.6 is a point release, capturing the current state of the development branch in a release version for the benefit of package maintainers who need a released version of the code and who cannot work off of the master branch. It contains numerous updates since release 2.1.4.
Update use of ImageMagick to use MagickCore-config if available. Xastir is still incompatible with ImageMagick 7, and if ImageMagick is desired instead of GraphicsMagick, it is necessary to use ImageMagick 6.
It is unclear whether Xastir will ever be compatible with ImageMagick 7, given that HDRI support is now standard in version 7, and is fundamentally incompatible with how Xastir's raster support works.
Update use of ImageMagick headers so we don't use deprecated headers in later versions of the library, and remove other uses of deprecated functions in ImageMagick 6.
Xastir now uses DBFAWK for all shapefile rendering. DBFAWK is no longer optional, which means that PCRE must be installed if shapefile support is compiled in.
Miscellaneous improvements to ADB-B and AIS processing scripts
Many warnings from gcc 9 have been cleaned up. There are still some from gcc 10.
The old Xastir_tigerpoly.pl script has been removed. This script only worked with Python 2 and is incompatible with Python 3. Although it was not an integral part of Xastir, some distros had flagged Xastir for removal because they had incorrectly designated Xastir as dependent on Python 2.7. The data format that Xastir_tigerpoly.pl used to process was long ago abandoned by the TIGER project, so the script is no longer necessary.
Some URLs that now redirect from http: to https: have been replaced with the correct https: URL in map fetching scripts.
The get-gnis script no longer looks for date-stamped files. This should eliminate the need to update this script every time the upstream date stamp changes.
NWS shapefile scripts have been updated to fetch the latest versions, and apropriate DBFAWK files updated.
Be aware that the upstream data source changes the files far more frequently than Xastir is released, and the script may go out of date long before the next point release. Users who care about this will have to work off of the git master branch instead of releases.
A bug in weather alert parsing was fixed. This bug had been introduced shortly before the 2.1.4 release.
The bootstrap script now exits with an error if any of the tools it requires are not found. We fielded too many questions from users who tried to follow the installation instructions incompletely, and were confused by this script's tendency to report it had finished successfully even though every single step it had attempted had failed.
Numerous compilation problems with gcc 10 have been fixed.
Configuration dialog boxes now auto-size to fit the screen, and provide scroll bars if the contents of the dialog box are too big to fit.
This change is made to allow better user experience for users on small screens (such as those on many Raspberry Pi builds).
Davis/LaCrosse weather station code no longer clobbers good, computed wind gust values when it receives "g..." from the database daemon (indicating no valid gust data received from the weather station itself). Xastir computes wind gust itself from the wind speed history, and will now only overwrite that computed value when the weather station computes a valid gust value itself.
This is a maintenance release that is being made primarily because a bug in Xastir impacts use with GraphicsMagick versions 1.3.32 and later, and is preventing adoption of Xastir 2.1.2 in package management systems.
The following changes have been made since Release 2.1.2:
This release of Xastir implements the following changes:
National Weather Service shapefile script updated, dbfawk files added.
Compilation errors in OS X earlier than 10.6 fixed.
Tiger WMS server maps added.
A new set of National Map .geo files replaces those that referenced WMS products that have gone off-line since the last release.
GDAL and OGR support removed.
Xastir builds are now reproducible (builds no longer contain the build date and time).
Deprecated GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick function calls replaced with new API.
Download of tiled maps is now handled by a download manager running in a separate thread, dramatically improving map update speed.
Obsolete interface to old Tiger/Line map server removed (the server went down years ago).
OpenTrac decoding support removed.
Support for the old PocketAPRS (PalmOS based APRS) map format has been removed. Users of these old map types should transition to a more modern format.
Xastir sources no longer contains a copy of an old version of shapelib source. Shapelib support must now always be provided by an external library.
The embryonic "Xastir-qt" project has been moved to a separate repository.
"Xastir -V" will now cause Xastir to report its version number (with git sha-1 hash appended if built from a git clone) and exit.
Support for many additional satellite navigation (GNSS) receivers has been added to the existing GPS support. Prior to this release, only NMEA sentences starting with $GP were recognized.
Many compilation warnings from recent GCC and Clang compilers have been eliminated, resulting in a cleaner build.
Our Makefiles now default to "silent rules" to reduce uninteresting output during compliation. The old, noisier behavior may be invoked by adding "V=1" to the "make" line at build time.
The configure summary now shows the status of its probe for Xpm libraries under "Xpm / Snapshots".
This is the official release of Xastir version 2.1.0. This is the first release of Xastir since the project's migration to Github in July of 2016. It is primarily a maintenance release, but has some notable new features.
Highlights of this release are:
To satisfy some objections to the formatting of the previous release attempt, I'm re-tagging Xastir 2.0.8 with an alternate name, so that the tarballs and zipfiles don't have extraneous "Xastir-" prefixes in the extracted file names. Other than this file naming issue, this release is exactly equivalent to the one tagged earlier (it is exactly the same commit that is being tagged, just given two different names).
This new tagging scheme ("Release-X.Y.Z") is the one that will be used for the upcoming 2.1.0 release.
The code in this 2.0.8 release is almost two years old. This "release" is purely intended so that package managers can update their packaging mechanisms ahead of the 2.1.0 release.
This release attempts to recreate the release bundle for Xastir 2.0.8 that had previously been created on SourceForge.
Note that this "latest" release is just a copy of a release that was actually done two years ago, and is primarily here to demonstrate that we know how to do releases on Github. There will be a new stable release shortly.